Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy's efforts to clear a hefty backlog of rape kits has gotten some national media attention.

The Daily Beast/Newsweek spotlighted Worthy's efforts to solve each of the 11,000 cases -- and some of the motivation behind that cause.

Daily Beast: Kym Worthy was a first-year law student at the University of Notre Dame when she was raped. A man approached her from behind as she jogged one night, throwing a cloth over her head and pulling her to the ground. That was some 30 years ago; she never reported the attack. “Things were different then,” she says. “And I was young.”

But as the Daily Beast reports, Detroit is not the only large city with a backlog of rape investigations.

Daily Beast: Cities across the country had reported stacks of kits: 11,000 in San Antonio, 1,200 in Albuquerque, 4,000 in Houston, according to Sarah Tofte, who has studied rape-kit pile-ups for Human Rights Watch. Experts estimate that hundreds of thousands of untested kits are languishing in police storage facilities.

Part of the reason for the clog is the price of testing the kits. Each kit can cost an average of $1,200 to $1,500, as technicians need to extract and separate DNA from two people—the victim and the assailant—from a swab, says Tofte, who writes about the issue in the new Human Rights Watch book, The Unfinished Revolution. But resources aren’t always to blame, she says; often the kits are simply a low priority for police.